This is a retelling of Tristan and Isolde, set in 1940s France. The script was written by Jean Cocteau.

Leternel.retour.1943.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-SbR.mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 53 min
Size: 	4.15 GiB
Video
Codec: 	x264
Resolution: 	1480x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	1.370
Frame rate: 	23.976 fps
Bit rate: 	5 091 kb/s
BPP: 	0.133
Audio
#1:  	French 2.0ch AAC LC @ 137 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/78E2F7C0817CE32/Leternel.retour.1943.1080p.WEB-DL.AAC2.0.H.264-SbR.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English (Hardcoded)

The post Jean Delannoy – L’éternel retour AKA Love Eternal AKA The Eternal Return (1943) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
The beautiful Princess Elena Sokorowska (Ingrid Bergman, Intermezzo, A Woman’s Face) has decided to marry a rich but much older than her man (Pierre Bertin, Les tontons flingueurs) because she can no longer support her lifestyle. But on Bastille Day she meets the young and handsome aristocrat Henri de Chevincourt (Mel Ferrer, Lili, The Black Corsair), who introduces her to his good friend General François Rollan (Jean Marais, Orpheus, Le Masque de fer). The General is so impressed by her beauty that immediately asks if they could meet again. Later on, Elena and Henri end up in a bistro where they drink red wine and kiss. When a group of loud patriots enters the bistro, Elena disappears into the night.

On the following day Henri goes looking for Elena, but is told that she has already left with her future husband.

Meanwhile, while experimenting with a new balloon Captain Vidauban and his assistant land in a not so friendly German village where they are promptly arrested. The news quickly reaches Paris and angry men and women go on the streets demanding that the government does whatever is necessary to free Vidauban. At the same time, a group of anti-government conspirators decide to approach General Rollan because he is the only man in the country that could get the job done.

But the last thing on General Rollan’s mind is politics. Since his introduction to Elena he has been thinking about her day and night, hoping that they would meet again, and perhaps even start a relationship.

Eventually, one of the conspirators comes with a plan that could potentially get General Rollan interested in politics, and even topple the government. For the plan to work, Henry must approach and convince Elena to see General Rollan, and then the Polish beauty must use her charm to convince General Rollan to take power and save the country’s honor.

The story does not flow as well as that of Jean Renoir’s French Cancan, but the visuals more than make up for the occasional missteps. There are sequences where it literally feels like the camera can’t get enough of the stunningly beautiful Elena (this isn’t surprising as Renoir once admitted while being interviewed by Jacques Rivette that he made the film because of Bergman).

The film does have a serious side (there are some interesting political overtones), but overall it is lighthearted and quite humorous. The main characters are involved in an entertaining game that constantly evolves, surprising even the most seasoned players. From start to finish Cupid is also hovering around, shooting arrows left and right.

The cinematography is fantastic. The footage from Bastille Day, in particular, rivals the lush visuals from French Cancan. The chaos that ensues after General François Rollan is arrested is also very effectively filmed.

Gaumont’s Blu-ray release of Elena and Her Men features the French-language version of the film. Renoir also filmed a slightly shorter English-language version which was the version of the film that was initially shown in the United States. The English version was named Paris Does Strange Things.

Elena et les hommes.1956.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 38mn
Size:	1.94 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Not met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	2 500 kb/s
Audio
French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 224 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/D4EFEB5C372043D/Elena_et_les_hommes.1956.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English, French, Russian

The post Jean Renoir – Elena et les hommes AKA Elena and Her Men (1956) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Synopsis
In 1779, the Marquis de Montauran returns to France and becomes the figurehead of a royalist uprising known as the Chouans. Their Republican enemies recruit the aristocrat Marie de Verneuil to capture the Marquis and thereby weaken the resolve of the Chouans. Unfortunately, Marie falls in love with the Marquis and is prepared to do anything so that she can marry him…

Vendée, fin du XVIIIe siècle. Après maintes défaites, le marquis de Montauran prend la tête des insurgés. mais le rassemblement est difficile. Nombreux sont sceptiques quant à ses qualités de commandement. Une espionne s’est, qui plus est, glissée dans ses rangs…

Les.Chouans.1947.DVDRip.XviD.avi

General
Container:	AVI
Runtime:	1h 32mn
Size:	1.10 GiB
Video
Codec:	XviD
Resolution:	640x464
Aspect ratio:	1.379
Frame rate:	25.000 fps
Bit rate:	1 581 Kbps
Audio
1.0ch MP3 @ 95.7 Kbps

https://nitro.download/view/6A03780C65BB243/Les.Chouans.1947.DVDRip.XviD.avi
https://nitro.download/view/79A60C74A0831ED/Les.Chouans.1947.DVDRip.XviD.eng.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Henri Calef – Les Chouans AKA The Royalists (1947) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Traumatized by the War of Algeria and by the accidental death of his wife and his son, Manu left the right road. His last caper was the attack of the Antwerp-Tangiers Express, carrying a precious cargo of industrial diamonds. But the whole affair was bungled and all of his accomplices got shot. The only survivor of this disaster, Manu now finds refuge in the mountain house of Lucia, the widow of a smuggler who lives alone there with her little boy…

Le.paria.1969.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 46mn
Size:	2.38 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Not met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	956x576
Aspect ratio:	5:3
Frame rate:	24.000 fps
Bit rate:	3 000 kb/s
Audio
French 2.0ch AC-3 @ 192 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/7C97A5BCD26DDF6/Le.paria.1969.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.mkv
https://nitro.download/view/57576CE36B8A10B/Le.paria.1969.576p.BDRip-AVC.ZONE.eng.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Claude Carliez – Le paria AKA Diamond Rush (1969) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Detective Marco is assigned to investigate a murder that has occurred at an exclusive boarding school for adolescent girls. The victim is a popular, wealthy girl found strangled in her bed. The school director tells Marco she expects him to find the killer outside of the school, and she bristles at his insistent interrogations of the school staff and the students. Marco learns that two sadistic games were played the night of the murder and that the victim had been tied up. There are a number of suspects, including a teacher with an unnatural affection for one of the girls; a suspicious Spanish gentleman at the town-inn, and some of the pupils themselves.

Dortoir des grandes (1953, 1080P, IPTV).mkv

General
Container:  	Matroska
Runtime: 	1 h 41 min
Size: 	2.18 GiB
Video
Codec: 	h264
Resolution: 	1920x1080 
Aspect ratio:  	16:9
Frame rate: 	50.000 fps
Bit rate: 	2 989 kb/s
BPP: 	0.029
Audio
#1:  	2.0ch AAC LC @ 93.4 kb/s

https://nitro.download/view/06EB11DE9D2D115/Dortoir_des_grandes_(1953,_1080P,_IPTV).mkv
https://nitro.download/view/E92463E9646FD77/Dortoir_des_grandes_(1953,_1080P,_IPTV).eng.srt

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Henri Decoin – Dortoir des grandes AKA Girls’ Dormitory (1953) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
While some other mid-20th-century directors were pursuing the chimera of “total cinema,” Jean Cocteau was chasing down the dream of a “total art.” But if “total cinema” meant capturing on screen the actual world as it really was, Cocteau’s “total art” meant giving form, instead, to the otherwise impalpable worlds of desire and dream. Both quests were fundamentally unrealistic, but Cocteau embraced this truth in ways both joyously inventive and technically rigorous. The most ambitious and talented fabulist since E.T.A. Hoffmann, Cocteau not only produced a vast and diverse corpus of poems, drawings, plays, sculptures, novels, and libretti, he also wrote and directed a small but astonishing group of films. Beauty and the Beast is the best of his five feature films and the greatest fable of his entire oeuvre—a vulnerable-beast-in-love tale to end all others, from King Kong to Edward Scissorhands.

Much of the film’s deep magic comes from Cocteau’s sense of himself as a vulnerable beast-in-love: In his mid-50s when he made the film, Cocteau was openly gay in an often viciously homophobic post-Vichy France, an opium addict, plagued by skin-disfiguring eczema, and yet still enamored of his much younger star, the Adonis-like Jean Marais, his sometime-lover and great friend and collaborator. In Marais’s triple role (he plays the monstrous yet tender-hearted Beast; Avenant, the hunky but caddish suitor of Josette Day’s La Belle; and the ensorcelled Prince Ardent, whom the Beast is ultimately revealed, with some ambivalence, to be), the actor lends virtuosic as well as symbolic appeal to Cocteau’s cinematic inquiry into the complex interplay of identification and desire. Between the time of their meeting in 1937 and Cocteau’s death in 1963, the two were often acknowledged publicly as a couple, though they both had other lovers as well. And they spent many of those years living together as a family, on and off, first in a Paris apartment and later in a grand house in the Fontainebleau Forest.

Made in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi Occupation of France, Beauty and the Beast depicts a very different sort of family, a traditional bourgeois family—La Belle’s—that happens to be in serious trouble: divided, penniless, and without a strong patriarch. In other words, la belle France itself. But, if Cocteau’s film in some ways pointed up the nation’s devastated present and uncertain future, it was also one of the first major cinematic triumphs of the post-war era. It helped revitalize France’s film industry, and thus in no insignificant way contributed to the nation’s renascent economic as well as cultural health. However, the film provides no evident “happy ending” for La Belle’s family; Cocteau doesn’t tell us what’s in store for her siblings, for example. Indeed, whether or not the film’s ending is a fully happy one even for La Belle herself remains an open question, just as it did for the allegorized bourgeois national family of post-Occupation France.

And, of course, just as it did for Cocteau himself. Beauty and the Beast is both a national tale and the very personal story of its creator’s sense of himself as a regal but cursed, aging but perennially romantic, gay artist. For all its very genuine and supremely successful appeal to the childlike, it’s also a mature, sophisticated meditation on gay aestheticism, and thus a crucial work in Cocteau’s lifelong project—not just to acknowledge, but also actively to participate in the artifice of the real. From the perspective of this aestheticism, there’s nothing “natural” or given about what appears to us as real. In cinema as in life, Cocteau believed, appearances aren’t mere reflections of reality, but rather the morphing, disturbed, beautiful, hideous creatures of human exertion and contortion. Appearances are visceral as well as visual, and Cocteau’s cinematic art is the art of living hands—like the flesh-and-blood, pre-CGI hands of the young actors who hold the magic candelabras in the famous corridor scene at La Bête’s enchanted castle.

Beauty and the Beast is a gorgeously ethereal film, but also one with sinews and bones and blood…and semen: The spilled pearls that magically self-assemble in La Bête’s palm during one of his failed erotic encounters with La Belle are just one example of the film’s abundant traces of the spunk of Cocteau’s consciously queer artifice. Such traces may be less “obvious” here than in Cocteau’s more explicitly homoerotic works. And yet it’s precisely the questions and challenges of visibility—of what’s obvious and to whom and why—that the film so masterfully explores. To better appreciate this, one has but to ponder the wildly complex, erotic interpenetrations and displacements among Marais’s three characters and the actor whose body fleshes them out.

In one of the film’s climactic scenes, Cocteau—the better to realize the unreal—directed that an actual arrow be shot into Marais’s back, fortified with cork beneath his Avenant costume. If that doesn’t yet amount to “total art,” it certainly comes close to a total commitment to the quest.

Jean Cocteau - (1946) Beauty and the Beast.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 33mn
Size:	1.85 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	2 117 Kbps
Audio
#1:	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps
#2:	French 5.1ch AC-3 @ 256 Kbps (Philip Glass’s opera "La Belle et la Bête")
#3:	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 128 Kbps (Commentary with film historian Arthur Knight)
#4:	English 1.0ch AC-3 @ 128 Kbps (Commentary with writer and cultural historian Sir Christopher Frayling)

https://nitro.download/view/874C82322ACAF8D/Jean_Cocteau_-_(1946)_Beauty_and_the_Beast.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jean Cocteau & René Clément – La belle et la bête AKA Beauty and the Beast (1946) first appeared on Cinema of the World.

Quote:
Jean Cocteau died on October 11, 1963, the same exact day that his longtime friend, the French chanteuse Edith Piaf, succumbed to liver cancer not all that far away. Some have even speculated that the news of Piaf’s death was what spurred the heart attack that claimed Cocteau, a beautiful, if melancholic coincidence, if we are to put our full faith into what’s ostensibly rumor, seeing as the famed poet, theater director, and filmmaker often remarked that he was more scared of the deaths of his loved ones than he was of his own inevitable demise.

These are the swirling, giddy facets of mythology, a subject that Cocteau was intoxicated with as much as he was a facilitator and victim of. His belief in the myth of the poet was akin to John Ford’s belief in the myth of the cowboy, which is to say that he was as much in love with them as he was aware of their shortcomings and their inescapable hypocrisies. Thus, his take on the legend of Orpheus, the second film in his Orphic trilogy, transposed to post-war France and redeployed as a fever dream, is less about grief and beauty than it’s about the struggles of artistic inspiration and the burdens of fame infused with half-hearted domesticity.

In Cocteau’s phantasmagorical vision, Orpheus (Jean Marois) is a heralded poet, not a musician, who has dipped in popularity slightly and thirsts for revitalizing inspiration. At a café, he runs into a young poet of newfound fame, Cegeste (Edouard Dermithe), who’s drunk and being followed by a nameless princess, played by Maria Casares, as formidable and haunting a presence here as she’s in Bresson’s Les Dames du Bois de Boulogne, which Cocteau scripted. Suddenly the young poet is struck dead and Orpheus is commanded to accompany the princess as she rushes Cegeste away in her car.

What Orpheus expects to be a trip to the hospital becomes a jaunt into the Zone, a crumbling, wonky world of death and decay that offers radio transmissions of disjointed poetry. Cocteau, working with cinematographer Nicolas Hayer and editor Jacqueline Sadoul, keeps the visual effects sublimely simple, beginning with the inverted-black-and-white view through the windshield that has something of a radioactive tinge to it. When they arrive at the princess’s house, who has now plainly announced herself as Death, Cocteau deploys one of his famous mirror shots, in which we see Death, Cegeste, and Orpheus travel between the Zone and France. Arriving in the hills outside his town, Orpheus becomes a companion of Death’s driver, Heurtebise (Francois Perier), but also grows obsessed with the radio bursts, which draw him away from his adoring wife, Eurydice (Marie Dea), here cast as a devoted trifle to a man who has seen into the abyss and can’t pull himself away.

Here, we have one of the major breaks from myth that Cocteau employs, offering something that’s steeped in his personal struggles. It’s of no small irony that Marais, Cocteau’s longtime lover and companion, plays a role that offers a glimpse at the isolationism and coldness that an artist will often adopt in the name of their craft, speaking so harshly and dismissively to the loving Eurydice, who Cocteau obviously saw as an amalgam of his past and current loves. So, when Death takes Eurydice to the Zone, it’s striking to see the fury in Marais’s performance that arises when Heurtebise bothers to tell him that she’s being taken and then, later, the tremendous sorrow that settles upon his shoulders when he realizes what he’s allowed. The two subsequent trips into the Zone make for some of Cocteau’s boldest uses of visual trickery, the most impressive of which being Orpheus and Heurtebise struggling against an unfathomable wind as the crawl along a set of ruins and slide into another realm of oblivion.

Orpheus returns from the Zone with Eurydice, initially, on the sole condition that he not gaze upon her visage ever again and the original text ostensibly ends not long after that, as Orpheus lays his eyes upon her, causing her to evaporate and himself to be devoured by the demonic Furies. Considering his preoccupation with the theater, it’s fascinating to note how Cocteau pushes Eurydice’s inevitable fate and extends the proceedings through a series of events that border on slapstick. There are some splendid movements made as Heurtebise and Orpheus labor to ensure the latter never sets an eye on his beloved, further echoing the bonds of domesticity that can lead great artists to madness. Relief isn’t the word for what Orpheus does after he accidentally stares at his doomed wife through the rearview mirror, but it’s not indicative of genuine grief; the word I’m looking for is flustered.

Imploring Heurtebise one final time, Orpheus ventures one back into the Zone, in hopes of embracing Death and spending the rest of his days in the Zone; there’s some beguiling talk about how he’ll live with Death that’s oddly effective. Despite its obvious use as an allegory for inspiration and existentialism in the context of the film, the Zone at once means nothing and everything. It would make a fitting metaphor for Cocteau’s debilitating opium addiction, but it also exudes something of a post-war dread, culling forth a desperation that feels relatable to what members of the French resistance must have suffered through. It would, in fact, be impossible not to notice the resemblance of the Zone, filmed largely in the ruins of the Saint-Cyr military academy, to photos of bombed-out cities left in the wake of the national socialists.

Still, Cocteau is nothing if not elusive in his use of symbolism and allegories, and Orpheus, though not as personal as Testament of Orpheus, in which Cocteau takes on the title role, has something of the same timelessness that the legend itself has enjoyed. In the film’s final moments, Death sacrifices herself to put things right, but the decision never feels like a bid for a happy ending, as we watch both Death and Heurtebise march toward some unknowable punishment at the hands of their judges. The filmmaker’s imagistic inventiveness is visionary, but his exciting use of visuals never dilutes, overwrites, or distracts from the great personal emotional weight that Cocteau’s script and his performers imbue his inky aesthetic with. This uniquely impassioned style was evident throughout Cocteau’s career but was never as potent as in his Orphic trilogy and especially Orpheus, which toggles between dream and reality, the bright future and the corroded past, love and aspirations, hopeless fate and unwise decisions with such deft technical know-how and wrenching dramatic power, even Charlie Chaplin was left to posit to its creator: “How’d you do that?”

Orpheus.1950.Criterion.576p.BDRip.x264.AC3-Q0S.mkv

General
Container:	Matroska
Runtime:	1h 36mn
Size:	2.92 GiB
DXVA:	Compatible
Minimum settings:	Met
Video
Codec:	x264
Resolution:	768x576
Aspect ratio:	4:3
Frame rate:	23.976 fps
Bit rate:	4 088 Kbps
Audio
#1:	French 1.0ch AC-3 @ 192 Kbps (Audio track)
#2:	English 1.0ch AAC (Commentary track)

https://nitro.download/view/1969894A97D959A/Orpheus.1950.Criterion.576p.BDRip.x264.AC3-Q0S.mkv

Language(s):French
Subtitles:English

The post Jean Cocteau – Orphée (1950) first appeared on Cinema of the World.